You may remember me mentioning this before. The local council want to build on their site, and it’s not just them. In another part of the country, Surrey to be precise they’re trying the same thing. I have great ties especially with this allotment site in Leatherhead, Surrey as it was where my Granddad had his plot. It was where I found out how much I loved gardening, and where it all started for me. If you can help Farm Terrace Allotments, please do. Is nothing safe anymore? Are we not allowed any green spaces to play? Moan over…for now anyway.

3 Responses to Farm Terrace Allotments are still fighting for stay!

Allotment holders are claiming a ‘first round victory’ in their legal challenge after forcing Eric Pickles to review his decision to allow the council permission to build on the Farm Terrace plots.

Solicitors representing the allotment holders had prepared to challenge the secretary of state for communities and local government in the High Court arguing he did not satisfy his own criteria that the allotments were “surplus to requirement” before sanctioning their destruction.

On Friday afternoon legal representatives of the Department for Communities and Local Government acknowledged the decision contained “an arguable error of law that the secretary of state gave insufficient reasons for departing from one of his policy criteria”.
The decision by the secretery of state will now be quashed and it will return to his office for re-determination.

We fought off a bid by land hungry developers and Council on our allotment site, (very short of land to build housing on, so we do sympathise, but not to extent of letting yet more allotments go), by measuring the biodiversity on sample squares distributed all over the site. It was rather humbling to quantify nature present and often unnoticed. (Who thinks about parasitic wasps??) And made such a case for the importance of the site right in a busy urban location, they changed their mind.
We also quantified the actual financial contribution a plot makes to a family budget and looked at records to identify on what conditions the land became allotments if it was a gift.
Hope that helps! Jacky